First Time Fondant

Oh fondant. I already have a love/hate relationship with it. It makes a cake look so pretty but it tastes so awful. Those lovely gum paste daisies aren't so delicious, either.

This was the first full fondant cake I've ever made. It was for my cake decorating classes that I was taking the last few months. There were a couple of things I learned.

The first thing I discovered was that tinting your gum paste with fondant will drastically lighten the color. This really should not come as any surprise as that, like with paint, white + regular color = pastel color. I chose daisies in particular because they're kind of special to me. I also ran out of time to make the chrysanthemums and daisies are easy. They were supposed to be the same neon teal (my camera made them blue) and pink as the rope border.  Oh well, they were still cheery! 

Speaking of that rope border...

While not as bad as I was rolling clay in grade school, my rolling could use improvement. Thin areas here, thicker there. Note to self: work on that.

Those flowers look a little messy. Had this not been for a class and thus classified as "practice" I assure you they would have been cleaned up once the gum paste was dry. I rolled it out a little too thick I think and that may have caused the problem. The leaves turned out surprisingly clean and that could be because I rolled the green a lot thinner.

Biggest lesson: black is hard to make. Yes, I wanted a black cake because it would really make the bright colors pop! Plus, a black, pink, and teal cake is very Stephanie. I used a chocolate fondant as a base and after adding what seemed like way too much black gel icing color I stopped at the color you see there. The colors still popped but it wasn't as dramatic as I had envisioned. It is my goal to one day achieve true black.

Confession time: I used a box cake. When I made this cake I had less than a week before I moved and a lot of my good stuff was packed.  It was still enjoyable and it served it's purpose as a way to display butter cream and fondant.

This cake concluded my cake decorating courses. Hopefully I'll be getting more practice in and out of school this coming year. I'm already planning my next cake and it will certainly have fondant. I bought some fun silicone molds and I can't wait to play around with them. My plan for next time is to make my own fondant from marshmallows. I did that once before and the taste is so much more pleasant than anything store bought that I've tried.

xoxo

Stephanie